Good. Now do clerics.

This morning, the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life issued a decree regarding leadership of lay associations and “new movements.”

In an introduction to the June 11 norms, the Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life said that it wanted to define “the criteria for prudently guiding government” in lay ecclesial movements.

The dicastery said that it therefore “considered it necessary to regulate the terms of office in government, with regard to their duration and number, as well as the representativeness of governing bodies, in order to promote a healthy renewal and to prevent misappropriations that have indeed led to violations and abuses.”

The new decree limits the terms of office in the central governing body to a maximum of five years, with one person being able to hold positions at the international governing level for no more than 10 years consecutively. Re-election is then possible after a vacancy of one term.

The decree states that founders can be exempted from the term limits at the discretion of the Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life.

The norms, signed by dicastery prefect Cardinal Kevin Farrell, come into force on Sept. 11.

In a note explaining the decree, the dicastery said that “infrequently, for those called to govern, the absence of limits in terms of office favors forms of appropriation of the charism, personalization, centralization, and expressions of self-referentiality which can easily cause serious violations of personal dignity and freedom, and even real abuses.”

I have no opinion on the value of these new norms – I’m a non-joiner myself – but I am interested in the explanation in the last paragraph bolded above.

Great!

Now do clerics:

…personalization….expressions of self-referentiality.

And maybe get your heads around the possibility that a liturgical form that centers and prioritizes the priest’s personal engagement with the congregation and gives him freedom to make up stuff (“in these or other words”) might contribute to…..personalization, centralization, and expressions of self-referentiality….

I’ve written about this many times in the past. This blog post summarizes much of that. Some highlights:

In the Mass, the priest is, of course, of central importance because he serves as in persona Christi. But the genius of the Roman liturgy historically is that the ritual supports his role at the same time as it buries and subsumes his individual personality under vestments, prescribed movements and words, not to speak of the roles that other ministers play. He does not wear his own clothes or say words of his own choosing. He must be present, but everything about what surrounds him in the moment points us to Christ, not this individual human being.

This childish notion that one’s experience of the liturgy is somehow dependent on whether or not Father is looking at us when he is praying to God is just that. Childish. Add to that concerns about how much he smiles, how friendly and welcoming he is, the jokes he tells and how relaxed he is, and you have, not The Most Well-Educated Laity in History at Mass, but a bunch of needy infants.  It also puts an inordinate amount of pressure on priests. Not only are they shoved up on pedestals, they are considered deficient if they fail to  warmly crack jokes and make eye contact in the process.

And from waaaay back in 2008, on clericalism. Haven’t changed my mind on this one, either:

In the not so distant past, I attended a Mass. It was a typical parish Mass. There was a choir in the back, there were Eucharistic ministers, there were lay lectors, there were altar servers. There was laity galore.

But the impression I took away with me – after an hour and a half – was the person of the priest. His voice echoed in my ears, his presence dominated my memory of that time. He introduced the Mass, he explained things, there was an RCIA rite, so he explained that, he preached a 25 minute homily, and at the end of Mass, after the lector ran through 6 announcements, he stood and added two rather lengthy announcements of his own.

I’m not kidding when I say that my reaction, at one point was, If you want to turn around, face the crucifix and whisper for a while, THAT WOULD BE FINE WITH ME. PLEASE. FEEL FREE.

I am under no delusions about the excesses of what could be a rather pathological pre-Vatican II clericalism (being a devotee of J. F. Powers as I am), but I am also not sure that the revisions to the Missal did a darn thing to “fix” it. I am thinking what just might have happened instead is an institutionalization of another sort of clericalism that enshrines the personality of the priest – the personality of the priest – as the guiding, formative framework of the celebration of the Mass.

It’s possible for a priest to allow his own personality to be subsumed into the liturgical rites as they are presently constructed. I’ve seen it done, often. But the opposite temptation is intensely evident in the present structure, and it seems to me to be a temptation that is not necessarily succumbed to out of ego – there is just a space and an expectation there that the priest’s personality is an essential element of the liturgy – if you read articles on this from the 70’s, it’s very clearly stated.

Then throw 21st century social media, a decades-long focus on personality as the core appeal of the globe-trotting papacy, the temptation to power-trip, messiah complexes and the assumption that evangelization=establishing a personal connection with a really cool person, and oy….

Give me Flannery’s ideal, instead, any day:

Not many people remembered to come out to the country to see her except the old priest. He came regularly once a week with a bag of breadcrumbs and, after he had fed these to the peacock, he would come in and sit by the side of her bed and explain the doctrines of the Church.

From a 1977 dramatization of the story from a series called “The American Short Story” that aired on PBS and was of course disseminated through schools. I may have seen one or two of these, I think. John Houseman is the priest and the series features a younger Samuel L. Jackson too. Watch it here.

Here’s the links to what films in the series you can see via the Internet Archive.

Tommy Lee Jones as the psychotic Abner Snopes in Faulkner’s “Barn-Burning” – I just skipped through it, but seems like a great performance. Huh. Maybe someone should re-digitize these….

Well, that blog post took an interesting turn. Typical, though, right?